That Night on the Roof Remember?
by badgerjaw
Summary: A promise made has been broken... until his voice echoed across the junkyard. KeiichiRena


Her eyes were fixed out of one of the cracked windows, picking out a small figure on the road above the dump. She wasn't quite sure if he could see her in the old abandoned bus, whether or not the soft electric light she lit inside was enough to notice from that distance, but she had a hard time caring if he saw her or not.

Lately, every afternoon manifested like this.

The club was becoming difficult to bear. Being around their smiling faces while she faked her own with an inhuman accuracy was like torture. Within her, her barrier was crumbling with every laugh and smile she desperately tried to share with them, mimicking those actions that Ryuuguu Rena had come to call her own, like the perfect doppelganger. She even managed a half-hearted 'cute-mode' if adorable outfits wormed their way into the punishment games. It should have been enough to fool everyone so she could flee to the junkyard.

But Keiichi followed her like the Oyashiro-sama of her past, only not as maddening.

Most times she started running towards the junkyard. Of course she knew that he could easily catch up with her if he wanted, being who he was and being around their particular groups of friends. But he never sped up to catch her. Instead he let her run so she could take brief solace in that time to herself until he arrived on the dirt road overlooking the junkyard.

And from her hideout in that delapitated old bus, she could see him pacing about sometimes, his posture whispering of worry. Sometimes he would simply stand and overlook the gleaming mess, the sun setting behind him and dousing him in the strange glow of twilight, the cicadas quieting for once in their summer songs to allow the wind to whistle softly through the trees and scrap metal. On those evenings, she watched him and wondered why he acted as if those few minutes on the roof of the school didn't exist.

The clang of hatchet on bat, the sting of flying sparks, the intense energy from the children and police on the ground, their prize if she were to defeat him or vice versa...

_Good morning._

_Good night._

But...

All those innocent children she had scared, the shadow of a deep and ugly wound on Mion's forehead, the faint smell of gasoline the lingered in the classroom... He can't have forgotten.

He couldn't be _that_ good-natured...

One warm evening in the middle of July, a couple of weeks after the incident, the cicadas were especially loud as the sky started to shine with pinpricks of stars. Her eyes were heavy with exhaustion and unshed tears and though she tried very hard to keep them open to gaze upon that figure on the road. It flickered in the heat radiating from her little lamp, so much at one point it appeared that it was waving to her.

Irritated by this slight optical illusion, she straightened up and tugged on the little window to let some fresh air stir the stale air inside. But when the dirty, cracked glass no longer lay between her and the figure, she realized that it wasn't a trick of wafting heat, but a reality.

Keiichi was waving vehemently at her and calling her name.

"RENA!"

She leaned out of the window, confused as to why as he would sound so earnest and upset.

"RENA!" he shouted, "RENA, GOOD NIGHT! I REMEMBER, OKAY? GOOD NIGHT!"

His voice echoed into the mountains of junk that she called treasure and straight into her heart a thousand times from each reverberation that made home in her ears. The sheer force of it rendered her immobile and half-way out the window like a child's quickly discarded marionette. So it was with numb eyes that she watched his small and darkened form shifting uncertainly, kicking up all kinds of dust, before he gave a last shy wave and headed back towards town.

His sudden disappearance from her sight startled her.

_He remembered?_

She backed up so quickly out of the window that she sent the lamp crashing to the floor in utter disrepair and broke an old snow globe as she raced through the window. Running up the mounds of trash had never seemed so difficult as it had them; every drum seemed to roll in the way, every bike wheel desperate to sink its spokes into her legs if she stepped too heavily. By the time the sturdy dirt road flew beneath her feet, her legs were covered in more scratches than she had ever earned in that junkyard, but adrenaline pumped through her veins like fire, so she wouldn't notice them until later, when her father pointed them out.

_He remembered!_

Before she even registered coming up on him, she already had her arms tightly woven about him. She buried her face into the space in between his shoulder-blades and reveled in how he immediately loosened when he realized who had attached themselves to him.

_You remembered._

He felt her smile through the material of his shirt.

"Good night, Keiichi."


End file.
